vim, harfbuzz, who's next? people ask in shock, but...

i think, fundamentally, the reason Claude and Codex are becoming part of crucial FOSS projects is the same reason xz almost became the entry point for mass-scale server hacking a few years ago. we've decided to make billion dollar industries rely on burned out, lonely individual developers who never found a way to get paid for their labor. we never managed to solve that problem.

these burned out, lonely devs see a tool that spits out the boring part of their work in a more or less functional manner if you squint, and it "only" (*) costs "$200" (**) a month. i can imagine why most people take it. heck, i won't deny that i am tempted myself, but my convictions remain too strong.

i've also seen some say that these people should step down and make way for new developers. who, exactly? i know how many months it took me to find a maintainer for one of the more popular Minecraft mods, and that's a position with both far more takers and far less responsibility on either side.

i think that a lot of what's going to happen to software in the next few years is the consequence of long term systemic issues. the introduction of LLM tools to the equation is merely an illuminant and accelerant
@asie
paying the maintainers would probably help a bit, but do you think it would solve the problem? IME the thing that's helps with burnout more is another person you can rely on to take care of things when you take a break, or don't want to do a particular task.

@wolf480pl @asie, honestly, I don't think money alone will help. Essentially, we've fucked civilization up.

The problem is not "not getting paid". The problem is getting a less or more bullshit job to pay your bills. The problem is corporate assholes turning your life to shit. The problem is other people, in the end.

People have happily worked on all these packages for free, for a long time. Burnout doesn't come from that. It comes from having a shitty job, it comes from having a shitty life, and it comes from the IT sector being overrun by shitty LinkedIn-brained people who enshittify everything they touch, including other people. The problem is really that wherever you look, whatever you do, you end up covered in so much shit, that you regret ever turning a computer on.

@mgorny @wolf480pl @asie ^ This. You can do amazing things with computers but commercial incentives are almost diametrically opposed to that.